Last week, I met with someone who has been in the investment world longer than I’ve been alive.

He went to Harvard Business School in the 1970s. He’s seen cycles, built real wealth, and lived through enough phases of the market to have a very different relationship to time.

At one point in our conversation, he mentioned – almost in passing – that he had boxes of vinyl records sitting in storage. Thousands of them. They belonged to his son, a professional DJ, and after his son’s heart attack, he didn’t really know what to do with any of it.

I know each record has an individual serial number. I don’t know which of those records are worth re-selling but figuring out which ones were would take hours he didn’t have.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this seemingly small but heavy problem.

So later that weekend, I built a small tool. Nothing particularly sophisticated – just something that could take that serial number, run it through a database, and return the artist, cover art, and an estimate of its value – a quick way to sort through what mattered and what didn’t.

I’m sure something like it already exists. In fact, I later found better versions already existed.

But that wasn’t really the point.

Spending a Saturday afternoon building something for one person – for one very particular situation – felt different from the kind of work I usually do. It wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t even necessary.

But it felt… meaningful.

And more than that, it felt luxurious.

Not in the way we usually think about luxury – nothing about it was expensive or outwardly impressive – but in a quieter way. The kind of luxury that comes from being able to notice something specific, care about it, and act on it without needing it to justify itself.

It changed how I think about luxury.

We tend to associate luxury with access – better things, better places, more convenience, more status. But increasingly, that kind of luxury feels easier to replicate. The internet has flattened access to almost everything, and AI has made it possible to generate an endless amount of content, tools, and output on demand.

What’s becoming rare isn’t access.

It’s specificity.

It’s the ability to create something that is shaped by your own taste, your own judgment, and your own willingness to pay attention. Something that isn’t meant for everyone – and couldn’t have been made by anyone.

In other words: signal.

In a world of near-infinite supply, unmistakable human signal starts to feel like a kind of luxury.

You can see the inverse everywhere – feeds filled with similar content, products that are technically impressive but emotionally interchangeable, tools that can do almost anything but don’t reflect anyone in particular.

What’s interesting is that even our old signals of luxury don’t seem to carry the same weight anymore.

Sora, OpenAI’s video product, launched with everything that should have made it feel inevitable: cutting-edge technology, massive attention, and even a reported $1 billion deal with Disney. If luxury used to mean access, capital, and cultural proximity, this was it.

And yet, it didn’t stick.

Not because it wasn’t impressive – it was – but because impressiveness isn’t the same as meaning. Scale doesn’t create signal. Access doesn’t create taste.

A billion dollars can buy distribution – it can’t buy distinctiveness.

When anything can be generated, backed, and distributed at that level, those signals stop feeling rare. The cost of creating has dropped to zero. But the value of creating something distinct – something that actually feels like it came from a person – has gone up.

That’s the direction I’m moving toward.

Not because I’m already living some fully formed version of a “luxurious life,” but because I can see what it’s starting to become. It looks less like accumulation, and more like control over how I spend my time and attention. It looks like building small tools that make my day-to-day responsibilities easier – so that I can focus more on the parts of my work, and my life, that feel intentional.

It looks like having the ability to respond to the moment in front of me – rather than defaulting to what’s easiest or most scalable.

And it looks like slowly orienting my life around creating more signal, and less noise.

Because the rarest thing now isn’t access, or even skill.

It’s the willingness to be specific.

And the most valuable work isn’t the most optimized or the most visible.

It’s the work that could only have come from you.